Intel Plans 160-Gbyte SSDs for Notebooks

Intel plans to ship a 160-Gbyte 2.5-inch solid-state disc drive (SSD)in a month's time, company executives plan to announce at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday.

Intel plans to ship a 160-Gbyte 2.5-inch solid-state disc drive (SSD)in a month's time, company executives plan to announce at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday.

Intel plans to launch the X-18M and the X-25M SSDs for notebook computers and Mobile Internet Devices in 30 days, at both 80- and 160-Gbyte capacity points. The 32-Gbyte and 64-GB X25-E SSD for enterprise servers and workstations will be released in 90 days, according to Troy Winslow, Intel's marketing manager for the NAND group.

Both the X-18M and X-25M use multi-layer cell technology, a more sophisticated version of flash than the single-layer-cell technology it evolved from, which then X25-E uses. As the name suggests, the X18-M is a 1.8-inch form factor, while the X-25E fits into the 2.5-inch form factor incorporated by laptops.

The X-18M and x-25M will have an expected lifespan of at least five years.

SSDs have attracted industry attention primarily because of the flash-based Apple iPod nano and shuffle MP3 players, which cast mainstream attention on the drives' ability to withstand shock and provide near-instantaneous access to data. However, their inclusion in notebooks PCs called out just how expensive such performance can be, versus a traditional hard disk drive. Recent reports have just muddled the market even more, with some reviews generalizing that all SSDs offer better performance than hard drives, and others claiming they don't. Winslow said that the wide breadth of drives  with 60 or so manufacturers  allows both claims to be true.

Although Intel isn't formally announcing pricing, the target price for both the X-18M and X-25 M is $8 per gigabyte, Winslow said, which would put the prices of the 160-Gbyte model at about $1,280, and the 80-Gbyte model at around $640. Neither is expected to be cost-competitive with a magnetic hard drive, but instead offer reliability and access times at level far beyond rotating media, Winslow said.

When asked if Intel would ship a smaller 40-Gbyte model which could be priced at a more reasonable $320 or so, Winslow said that capacity point was "under consideration". "At this point, I'm fully in your camp," Winslow said. However, he explained that the decision wasn't up to him; Intel's notebook PC OEM customers had asked for the 80- and 160-Gbyte capacity points, and had their own corporate customers willing to buy them.

The X25-E enterprise drive is rated at 35,000 IOPS, and up to 250 Mbytes/s sequential read and 170 MB/s sequential write. Read latencies are about 75 microseconds. From a power perdpective, the drive consumes 2.4 watts in active mode, and 0.06 watts while idling. Both the X25-M and X-18M read and write data at 250 Mbytes/s and 75 Mbytes/s. respectively. Power consumption is about 0.15 watts in active mode, and 0.06 watts while in idle.

In related flash news, Intel recently announced "Turbo Memory with User Pinning," a fancy name for a flash technology built into some PCs. The "Robson" cache technology uses an installed flash chip for caching local data, to speed up boot and recovery times in Wndows Vista. Until now, however, the operating system managed the caching operations. Now, the user can control which applications gain the benefit.

Via a software interface, "you can goose your app, and drag it into the turbo memory cache and see immediate benefits," Winslow said.

The cache memory's sketchy performance under Vista has provoked some controversy. "Even through we've worked with Microsoft, we just didn't get the consistent performance that was expected," Winslow said.

Future flash controllers may be built into Intel's chipsets, however, so the caching technology isn't going away, Winslow said.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to 120-Gbyte Intel SSDs.